Caring For Each Other, Northern Goddess

Here is one of the better visions of compassion and one world view that supports it.

Caring for Each Other

The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.

If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, "He is of no use to us?" For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.

- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., "Medicine for the World," from the Summer 2008 Tricycle.

I feel deep accord with Andrew, though I would add that Father God takes his less than sufficiently powerful position by agreement with us and with the planet, with Mother Earth as well. He could clean this up but He won't, because He promised not to. That is why this is God's Permitted World, not God's World.

I take the position that the primary Trinity is the Taoist one, Heaven, Earth, Man and that we are equally pivotal through the point of soul, co-creators of our destiny in ourselves and on the planet. This is by the deeper collective agreement that upholds the thematic personal agreements that we keep or break in individual lifetimes.

But I am too smitten to leave it at that. I require by my erotic nature that Mother Earth take another aspect. I need a lover. I need not only the triune aspect of the world's co-creation and the quaternity of my crucifixion here and yours, I need as well the duality of communion and the orgasmic nature of encounter with holiness within this lifetime, with Goddess and with you.

Northern Goddess

Your heart is thunder
and you stand so lightning struck
with your smoky hair,
a goddess, true north
for the creatures of the dry
found south of your lines.

March 10, 2009 7:34 AM